A federal appeals court on Feb. 28 rejected an attempt by President Joe Biden’s administration to partially lift the block on the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for a group of Navy SEALs. A federal judge in January blocked the mandate’s enforcement for 35 Navy members, many of them SEALs, ruling that the Navy provided a process for adjudicating religious exemption applications “but by all accounts, it is theater.” At the time of the ruling, the Navy had granted zero religious exemptions. As of Feb. 23, it had still granted none. Nonetheless, officials asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to allow the military to take into account the unvaccinated status of the 35 members when making “deployment, assignment and other operational decisions.” They argued that “forcing the Navy to deploy plaintiffs while they are unvaccinated threatens the success of critical missions and needlessly endangers the health and …